Ageless

I have decided to become ageless from here on.  One of those big number birthdays is looming in the coming year for me and judging by the way friends and family have handled theirs I think it might be best to just skip this one.  What is it about the birthdays that end in a zero anyways?  We seem to make such a fuss about them. Are there birthday cards that say "Happy 59th!"?  No, but look for wishes for your 40th, 50th, or 60th and they abound. I had lunch with a long time friend the other day who has a sixtieth birthday coming up in a couple of weeks and when  I asked her about it she cringed and looked furtively around the restaurant. "Don't say that too loud" she whispered, concerned that someone who knew her might be within hearing. Hmm. It appears to be a thing to be dreaded so the best solution to the problem is to be ageless. If anyone asks me how old I am, and let's face it very few people do ask that question of me nowadays, I'll give them my year of birth and let them figure it out for themselves.
Many years ago I worked with a woman who belonged to the Kabalarians, the group that believes in numerology, mostly as it pertains to your name. Change your name, change your destiny is their philosophy. I asked her what her previous name had been and she told me she couldn't speak it. To say the name would be like putting a drop of black paint into a bucket of white, ruining the perfection of her life.  So that's the approach I am going to take, I cannot speak my age. It would be the drop of black in the beautiful white pool of my life.

Enigmatic....

My handsome husband is often taken for being ten years younger than he is so it is even more imperative for me to become ageless. I don't think I can peel ten years off my age but if I become ageless, it's simple, right?  I can hear it now..."Ted looks like he's fifty, how old do you think Faye is?" "Ageless." will be the response. I love it. It is said you are as old as you feel. Well, some days I wake up feeling thirty five, other days it's more like seventy or what I imagine seventy to feel like. So the concept of agelessness dovetails perfectly with that sentiment. My age will flow up and down with how I feel every day, never settling on any one number.  I'm going to have to work at a few things here, no dressing like my children's generation does, no dressing like my mother, just floating somewhere in between, careful not to chase the fads and trends. To be ageless I need to be able to be imagined in any era. I will listen to all kinds of music, get better at technology and read more classics, maybe try to rid myself of generational specific slang. Be enigmatic.
I feel better already about the coming year. When you are ageless you don't age.. obviously. I'm sure that's how it will work. I will just be perfectly myself everyday at whatever stage I am at. There will be some spoilsports, I know, people wanting to throw great globs of black paint into my bucketful of white but let them. We, the ageless are not bothered by such mean spirits. Birthdays can still be celebrated just without the counting of candles and the balloons with big numbers on them floating above my head. You are all welcome to join me in agelessness. As one of my yoga teachers often says, "experience what it's like to drop one of the labels that you carry around." I always think of the labels of mother, wife, daughter when he says that but dropping the label of age is even more liberating. Think of it. Ageless.

The Birth of Venus by Botticelli